Here's some good screenshots that illustrate what's going here on my end...
I was going to start with the "New Thread missing text area" problem, but encountered the blank "Post Reply" (no text area) problem, so we'll start with that first:
After hitting Refresh a few times, the text area eventually appeared.
Now, regarding the New Thread issue - when I attempt to start a new thread, this is what I encounter:
After refreshing the page several times (average is 3 times can be as many as 6), I finally get the text area:
Now, keep in mind that this event happens to both my PC and my ipad at random times, no set pattern.
Sometimes both work fine, sometimes only one and not the other - sometimes neither work worth a sh!t.
To recap, my computer is a beast, running a fully updated Firefox v.47.0 with NO third-party addons except Flashgot. It is connected to my DSL router via a Cat5/RJ45 that is 1 meter in length.
My ipad is fully updated, using the iOS Safari that
cannot use any third-party addons and automatically dumps it's cache after each session. It is connected to my router via 128-bit WEP encryption and transfers data at max. speeds both up and down.
So here we have two completely different devices, completely different operating systems, connected by completely different connection methods and yet, producing the same random results.
As I've mentioned before, I feel that it's not a matter of a user's equipment, but a failure between the client's ISP router and the Cloudflare site retrieval. The Cloudflare connection has proven to be problematic in the past and quite random as to who was effected, like some folks in various regions of Canada, some various regions of the U.S. and some in various regions of Europe - usually at different intervals.